Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses gang-related violence, drug abuse, and police violence.

“When I showed Mrs. Pearl the transcript of the conversation, she changed ‘wit’ to ‘with,’ ‘dem’ to ‘them,’ and ‘tryna’ to ‘trying to.’ Even though she agreed that my recounting of her dialogue accurately depicted what she actually said and how she actually sounded, she explained, ‘Some things are just right,’ and what I had given her to read wasn’t. To make matters worse, she chided me: ‘You’re supposed to be educated, boy.’ She even shook her head.”

This quote illustrates the tension between authentic representation of language (descriptivism) and linguistic prescription, which attempts to dictate “correct” language use. It also foreshadows one of the main threads of the books: the struggle for authenticity in Eastwood. Mrs. Pearl’s insistence on standardizing the language in the transcript highlights a conscious recognition of and adherence to conventional language norms. Mrs. Pearl does not align with the street vernacular ideologically, so she does not understand the value in representing it authentically. Her remark to Laurence Ralph underscores an expectation for the narrator, as an educated individual, to uphold these standards, suggesting a tension between his role as member and academic observer of this community.

“There, people did not merely speak of injury in terms of gunshot wounds. Longtime residents saw injury in the dilapidated houses that signaled a neighborhood in disrepair; gang leaders saw injury in the ‘uncontrollable’ young affiliates who, according to them, symbolized a gang in crisis; disillusioned drug dealers saw injury in the tired eyes of their peers who imagined a future beyond selling heroin; and health workers saw injury in diseases like HIV and the daily rigors of pain and pill management that the disease required.”

In this quote, Ralph highlights the nature of injury as perceived in the community of Eastwood. Injury extends beyond physical violence to encompass social and emotional dimensions. The quote shows that the concept of injury is deeply embedded in the community’s collective consciousness, with each group identifying different manifestations of harm, be it through physical environment, organizational disruption, mental fatigue, or health challenges. Ralph repeats the phrase “saw injury” to the point of anaphora to highlight the relentlessness of these conditions.